Ridden

Looking at us and making that face, like future, black night keeps breaking in through windows it's already in and always been in. The stab of the moon: that lonely dog, that punk star struck and stuck in black her long hung face of want fawns over our street, through the chain linked fence, regifts what she takes. Night, essentially she laps up, rearranges, remakes, even my big red bra gets dragged through the dark, snapped from the clothesline, spat and scattered into bright red scraps, starring the yard. The black mouth of sky purses and flirts and pouts. Moon’s yellow slit tongues and pants: now the doorjamb, now the key- and peephole, now licks clean the tiny rips in our sheets we can’t even feel. The moon, electrified, won’t be ridden. Tonight I want to learn something entirely new: my lips to go giddy and my mouth giddy-upped in hot pink, trotting out firecracker blahblahs in bed, sparkling and always watched. And you play the boy who even in dark flickers like a red hot on the tongue, or a wet leather whip. Your head all spikes: self-perpetuating flame of tongue, teeth all fang and yellowed claw. Silver piercings like black moon- glass breaking through your nose and earlobes. A boy whose head whines during sex, your whistling breaths as if the heart cries out through your nose, ringing a sharp tune—the rhythmic soft screech like a bowie knife stuck in a sharpening trick its blade endlessly pumped against wet stone. Whole chest heaves, fence of fur and howl of tattoos: the lame cobra watching from your skin a faded titty-bitch, and dull and wrong commands of ideograms going gray. Tonight I either want to join them, to climb you and hang there, pale and shut tight or I want to ride you exactly the way I’ve been practicing. Exactly the way the dark, like the sleek black wolf, seizes and rides her land, stamps it out cold, remakes the blades of grass and stones, rearranges her territories beneath, ever knowing only now and go.

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